[text][index](url) syntax

[Alan Hogan]

I haven’t ever seen that used in plaintext writing before, which would make the syntax probably violate the principle of being derived from email list / plain text patterns.

More concerning is that now potentially literal brackets that were adjacent to a link, if anyone had that, would now be linked and more importantly the link text would be hidden. But maybe that’s not so common.

Personally, I don’t see why it’s a big problem to just define the link at the bottom if you want to use it in several places.

But, you did get me thinking. It would be interesting if there was a magic named link, "ibid.", which always refer to the preceding link, in context. So:

    [One](http://one.example.com), [two][ibid.], [three][ibid.], [four][], [five][ibid.]
    
    [four]: http://four.example.com

Would generate three links to one.example.com and two to four.example.com.

(If the user had manually defined a link named "ibid." then that would take precedence over the magic implementation. And of course, the first link in the document cannot be an 'ibid.' link; I suppose the behavior should be to either output a link with no href value or just emit the plain text.)

On May 30, 2012, at 1:59 PM, Jakob wrote:


> Hi there! I wanted to drop a line on the markdown syntax used for links:

> 

> When i reference to [some website][1] and want to do [the same reference][1] later ai can only do this in endnote style (or howeer it's called). What i would want to be able to do is to make [an inline reference to a website][2](http://anotherexample.com) and be able to reuse [that reference][2] just the same.

> 

> What do you think about that? Godd idea? Crap?

> 

> Regards,

> 

> Jakov

> 

> [1]: http://example.com

> 

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